I have a quick little note about something that very few outside of Redmond knew about and that is Xbox 360 Project “Helium”. It was a concept to combine a high-end gaming Windows PC with a Xbox 360 motherboard as a daughterboard. It never was even remotely implemented and moved off the drawing boards but the idea was for a third party manufacturer to license and include a daughter board made by Microsoft that would be housed in a desktop PC to add an Xbox 360 functionality to the PC. Instead they went with Games For Windows LIVE.

However if things have been a bit different there might have been hybrid Xbox 360s cards inside Windows PCs so you could check your email and then boot up Crackdown or Rock Band. PC makers could have optional Xbox 360 integration and the additional space inside a PC case might actually be just what the Xbox 360 hardware needed to thrive without frying itself. It would have been pricey since it would have to be an OEM option but it would have rocked at LAN parties.

I don’t have any concrete proof of the existence of Xbox 360 project “Helium” but the next time that you run into high level Xbox personal throw the codeword into a conversation and watch what facial expression they make.Update: When I first published the article I had the name as “Argon”. It actually was project “Helium”. Project Argon was the removable faceplates on the Xbox 360. Darn periodic table code names. My father a chemistry professor would be very disappointed in my mistake.